Monte Paraiso - Spanish Life


	SPANISH LIFE
	Traditions Of Easter

Spain and fiesta seem almost synonymous to the foreign imagination, but at no time is the relationship between the two more symbiotic than during Easter.

Semana Santa is the one time of the year when the Spanish love of colour, gaiety and noisy celebration is tempered with a touch of solemnity as Spain's predominantly Catholic people keep faith with the forms and spirit of the traditional religious observance of their forefathers to commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

While the Semana Santa festivities are a national celebration of passion and life, and most towns and cities mark them with solemn religious acts and processions, nowhere is the grandiosity and the religious spirit of Semana Santa in Spain more perfectly captured than in Sevilla.

On the four days of Semana Santa members of various brotherhoods (Hermandades) clad in the forbidding hooded dress of penitents (nazarenos), and carrying candles, pass through the streets, accompanying large and elaborately adorned carved groups representing saints, or scenes from the Passion, or one of Sevilla's numerous Virgins. Each of the floats or 'pasos' makes their slow progress to the Cathedral from the church of its brotherhood through streets thronged with tens of thousands of onlookers. Once they reach their destination they pass through the Cathedral and then embark upon the return journey to their starting points.

Halts in this procession are frequent and seats which may be booked at various sites for the series of four days, and other vantage points should be taken up in good time, having checked in advance the approximate hour at which the pasos pass. The 'saetas', ostensibly spontaneous exhibitions of religious fervour, are often sung by professionals as part of the pageant.

In other cities such as Madrid, Segovia, Avila, San Vicente de Sonsierra and Valverde de la Vera the Semana Santa processions, particularly on Good Friday, are even more lugubrious with robed and hooded penitents, looking like members of the Klu Klux Klan, marching, many of them bare foot, in chains and carrying heavy wooden crosses, behind effigies of Christ crucified or on the road to Calvary.

In Madrid an image of the Christ of Medinaceli is paraded through the streets accompanied by a procession of people carrying chains and shackles dressed in the white medieval garb of penitents.

While Valverde de la Vera (Cáceres) has a unique procession, with echoes of the Inquisition in it, as well as of the medieval flagellants who wandered across Europe announcing the imminence of the day of the final judgment. In the procession the 'Empalaos' (The impaled ones), walk through the town wearing hoods and in bare feet as if on their way to Calvary with their arms tightly bound to a crossbeam. On top of their heads they wear a crown of thorns. From each side of the crossbars rings and swords up to a weight of thirty kilos are hung.

The further South you go in Spain the less austere the celebrations seem to be. In Elche (Alicante) the crowds thronging the streets during the procession of the Hallelujahs, shower the 'pasos' carrying the Resurrected Christ and the Virgin of the Asuncion with a downpour of multicoloured confetti.

While in Gandía (Valencia) people from all over Spain, come to see the famous procession of the paso of the 'Christ of the Flagellation' on Good Friday, with the religious festivities culminating on Easter or Resurrection Sunday with the procession of the 'Glorious Encounter'.

The history of the present-day traditions of Semana Santa in Spain have their origins in the medieval 'Reconquista' (re-conquest) of Southern Spain from the Moors by the Christian kingdoms of the North. Hermandades were formed during the re-conquest to rescue injured soldiers from the battlefields and to bury the dead. The hermandades were first organized according to medieval membership of a professional guild, and by the 16th century, the tradition of processions to symbolize the journey of Christ to Calvary was firmly established in Spain.

Whatever you do, wherever you are, make sure you don't miss out on the spectacle and the religious passion of the processions. Each town and city is sure to have its own unique interpretation of what Semana Santa means, and each one of these interpretations is certain to be unforgettable.